My Therapeutic Approach
What Person-Centred Therapy Means to Me
At the heart of my work is a simple intention: to offer a space where you can be met as you are. A space where nothing in you needs to be hidden, managed or fixed; where you can begin to listen to yourself with gentleness and curiosity.
Person-centred therapy, developed by Carl Rogers, is built on the belief that you hold within yourself vast resources for self-understanding and growth. My role is not to direct or advise, but to create the conditions in which those resources can emerge.
Rogers identified three core conditions that make therapeutic change possible:
Genuineness: I meet you as myself, not from behind a professional mask. In our sessions, I stay aware of my own responses and, when it serves our work together, I share them openly. There's a transparency to how I am with you.
Unconditional acceptance: I hold a positive regard for you, whatever you're experiencing in any given moment. Confusion, anger, fear, joy, shame - all of it is welcome here. This is a non-possessive caring that doesn't require you to be anything other than what you are.
Empathic understanding: I listen not just to your words, but to the feelings and meanings beneath them. I try to sense what you're experiencing from within your world, and reflect that understanding back to you.
When these conditions are present, change becomes possible, not because I fix anything, but because you feel safe enough to understand yourself more fully.
Presence
For me, presence means bringing every part of myself to our encounter. Not just my training or my professional knowledge, but my whole self: my life experiences, my capacity to be moved, my willingness to be touched by what you bring.
My own experiences as a woman, an immigrant, a mother, someone who has known love and loss, grief and joy - these aren't separate from my work. They're part of what allows me to truly meet you. When you speak of struggle, I recognise something of that territory. Your story is uniquely yours, but I can meet you in that shared space of being human.
Presence means staying close when things are difficult, sitting with you in uncertainty, allowing myself to be affected by your experience. It means trusting that understanding emerges not from analysis, but from genuine connection.
The Therapeutic Relationship
Therapy lives in the relationship, what happens when two people are willing to show up authentically with each other.
The therapeutic alliance forms when we're both prepared to be genuinely present. When I can offer acceptance, empathy and realness and when you feel safe enough to explore your inner world, something shifts. You begin to listen to yourself more accurately, with greater understanding and compassion.
I meet you not as an expert diagnosing problems, but as someone who has also known complexity and the longing to be understood. Sometimes there are moments where something genuinely shifts, where you feel deeply seen, where the weight feels lighter. These moments can't be forced. They emerge from trust, connection and the willingness of both of us to be vulnerable.
Embracing Paradox
Life is full of contradictions. We can love someone and feel anger toward them. Feel strong and fragile simultaneously. Grieve deeply and still find joy. Person-centred therapy makes room for all of this.
We don't have to choose between seemingly opposite truths. We can hold both. Brian Thorne writes that "the world of the 'both-and' is infinitely wider and more invigorating than the cramped conditions prevailing in the world of either-or."
This both/and way of being is something I embody in our work together. I am professional and human. Strong and vulnerable. Knowledgeable and still learning. It's in this space of paradox that real growth often happens.
What I Believe About Change
As you feel accepted and understood, you begin to develop a more caring attitude toward yourself. As you're empathically heard, you become able to listen more accurately to your own inner experience. Understanding yourself with greater compassion means you can make choices more aligned with who you really are.
Carl Rogers wrote:
"It seems to me that clients who have moved significantly in therapy live more intimately with their feelings of pain, but also more vividly with their feelings of ecstasy; that anger is more clearly felt, but so also is love; that fear is an experience they know more deeply, but so is courage. And the reason they can thus live fully in a wider range is that they have this underlying confidence in themselves as trustworthy instruments for encountering life."
This is what I hope our work together can offer: not perfection, but a fuller, more honest way of being with yourself and your life. The capacity to meet all of your experience, the difficult and the joyful, with presence, understanding and trust in yourself.